Pragmatic Studio: Rails Studio Day 2

Today was day two of Rails Studio. Dave Thomas and Mike Clark really ramped up the fire hose today. We continued working on our project site and today worked through creating our own forms, working through ActiveRecord and creating relational mappings and passing things around from page to page. We also went through routes and mapping URLs around to the appropriate controllers. Powerful stuff.

I really appreciated the long block of time spent on using REST in Rails 2. I was very impressed with how integrated REST is into Rails applications right out of the gate. If you use the default routing and scaffolding you instantly get REST operations on all of your models. Wow.

The hardest part of todays class though was just working through the plumbing of getting related data sets working around a data model. We were adding reviews to our event application. I’ve done this before in a number of languages and frameworks, and Rails 2 does this better than any of the ones I’m familiar with.

Today tied up the fundamentals to building 95% of all web applications. We’ll wrap it up tomorrow with user logins and filters, as well as handling deployment to production in the real world. I’m really happy I took the time to do this.